our clothes and houses and furniture, and poetry and fiction and painting, as the beautiful, and it may be from an instinctive or a reasoned sense of this that some of the extreme naturalists have refused to make the old discrimination against it, or to regard the ugly as any less worthy of celebration in art than the beautiful; some of them, in fact, seem to regard it as rather more worthy, if anything.  Possibly there is no absolutely ugly, no absolutely beautiful; or possibly the ugly contains always an element of the beautiful better adapted to the general appreciation than the more perfectly beautiful.  This is a somewhat discouraging conjecture, but I offer it for no more than it is worth; and I do not pin my faith to the saying of one whom I heard denying, the other day, that a thing of beauty was a joy forever.  He contended that Keats’s line should have read, “Some things of beauty are sometimes joys forever,” and that any assertion beyond this was too hazardous.

II

I should, indeed, prefer another line of Keats’s, if I were to profess any formulated creed, and should feel much safer with his “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” than even with my friend’s reformation of the more quoted verse.  It brings us back to the solid ground taken by Mr. Symonds, which is not essentially different from that taken in the great Mr. Burke’s Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful—­a singularly modern book, considering how long ago it was wrote (as the great Mr. Steele would have written the participle a little longer ago), and full of a certain well-mannered and agreeable instruction.  In some things it is of that droll little eighteenth-century world, when philosophy had got the neat little universe into the hollow of its hand, and knew just what it was, and what it was for; but it is quite without arrogance.  “As for those called critics,” the author says, “they have generally sought the rule of the arts in the wrong place; they have sought among poems, pictures, engravings, statues, and buildings; but art can never give the rules that make an art.  This is, I believe, the reason why artists in general, and poets principally, have been confined in so narrow a circle; they have been rather imitators of one another than of nature.  Critics follow them, and therefore can do little as guides.  I can judge but poorly of anything while I measure it by no other standard than itself.  The true standard of the arts is in every man’s power; and an easy observation of the most common, sometimes of the meanest things, in nature will give the truest lights, where the greatest sagacity and industry that slights such observation must leave us in the dark, or, what is worse, amuse and mislead us by false lights.”